201–210 of 270 posts
Are there any known ways to undo the compression? Assuming no clipping, the process should be reversible, right?
For analog there are similar limitations, but it's limited by other factors like noise.
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And who, exactly, would approve that misguided proposal? I suspect you’re not involved in contemporary record making. Like it or not, clipping is a technique and a color that producers, mixers, and mastering engineers all choose to impart for aesthetic and technical reasons. It has it’s uses. If your proposal were passed all that would be left for consideration would be a handful lame DSD jazz records from those hi-f…
You might find it lame, but jazz has the highest share of physical media sales in the US https://www.statista.com/chart/32863/genres-with-the-highest...
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Most people listen to music in their car. More compressed audio means less fiddling with the volume knob as you drive, regardless of normalization done by Spotify et al. Anyhow that's my theory
> Most people listen to music in their car. Most people don't have cars
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You should save the exaggerated euphemisms for your audiophile subreddits. "square waves pressed on to vinyl" just proves you have no clue of the physics to an HN audience.
Yep, never studied physics. Do know the difference between a sine wave and a square wave, though. We can debate whether people can hear the difference, and mastering has as much (or more) to do with it, but I will take an AAA or AAD over an ADD all day.
1. Digital recording equipment had significantly improved
2. Audio engineers learned how to use the equipment
3. Heavy digital compressors weren't in use yet.
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> That is a false way of saying it As an audio engineer I'm well aware of how decibels work and why we use them. You're talking about subjective perception but I'm talking about objective measurements.
This whole thread is about subjective perception, other than yours
When someone claims that vinyl has less than half the DR of a CD then I think it's important to clarify how big of a difference it actually is. I would imagine HN would care about 16bits vs aprox 10bits of dynamic range.
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People are getting angry at the math here. I'm Not the OP and have no moral judgement here, but from strict bank account balance perspective it's the same. Persuade me otherwise through addition and subtraction, not moral appeals. 1. I have 10,000 in my bank account. 2. I see a 1,300 record I like 3. I buy it 4. My bank account now has 8700 5. There's 1,300 difference if I choose to buy it or not 1. I have 10,000 in…
friction and transaction costs exists in our world which are absolutely factors that would delineate the economic utility of purchasing a new luxury item from selling an already owned luxury item. Spend $2. Receive album worth $1000. Make $300 an hour at job. Have no immediate use case for $1000 in cash. Have somewhat immediate want for music on that album. Time to sell album with high quality images/ description, de…
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Huh? CDs are a poor fit in cars to the point that the ten disc changer in the trunk was a thing. To avoid the inevitable damage from swapping them.
Now, yes, but in the 90s/00s the alternative to CDs was cassette tapes, which were both inferior audio quality and took up more space. CD players in cars were a very desirable feature back then. At my peak in the mid-00s I remember counting and finding I had just over 500 CDs in my car, almost all of which were MP3s burnt to playable CD-Rs laying in the passenger seat... the good old days. Nice thing about using CD-R…
Sick of listening to whatever's in the deck right now?
Just rummage through them without looking using the gear-shift hand and hold one up in an instant without taking eyes very far off the road. Upon finding one that's Good Enough For Right Now: Pop the old one out of the tape player with a ker-chunk and a blast of radio noise, and then quickly plunge its replacement into the empty hole -- all with muscle memory.
Frozen mist on the windshield on a cold morning? There's a cassette-shaped ice scraper right there in the dash. Take it out, use it to scrape the ice off the window, and put it back in. It still works.
CD-Rs helped a ton and I deliberately avoided CDs in cars until I was able to make CDs cheaply at home. But they were still delicate things in ways that tapes never were, they still skipped in ways that tapes never did, and their sonic improvements weren't very meaningful over the wind and road noise with the factory stereo of a malaise-era Chevrolet.
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Which is why it's so bizarre that CDs are generally less dynamic than vinyl. There's no technical reason that should be the case.
CDs were most commonly played in cars on the loud highway
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Yep. Most people aren't in a quiet environment when they listen to music these days. Compression helps significantly with this. What would be neat would be to have a compression metadata 'guide' that would allow a compressor on-device to perform the compression, rather than baked into the audio track. This would allow the user to tune 'severity' of compression. In a car / fancy headphones, you could sample the ambien…
You are very off here. People have been playing music in their cars and in clubs for decades, and a lot of them play tracks that predate the loudness wars. If anything, people are more isolated than ever and have much better headphones and speakers than even 10 years ago. You're conflating regular compression with the insanely over the top mastering people started doing. This goes way beyond keeping people off the vo…
.. which is ironic, because the end result usually sounded terrible. You know, overly compressed.